Thursday, March 6, 2008

More on Yesterday

Congratulations to the LSU basketball team on another win last night. That makes four in a row, and I think we've accomplished what we wanted to accomplish regardless of what happens with Mississippi State on Saturday. Am I getting way ahead of myself to think we might have a real shot at winning the tourney?

Anyway, the Tigerdroppings issue is still in my mind. Let me make one thing very clear. I do not begrudge Tigerdroppings its success, nor do I set out to pick a fight with it. Quite the contrary, every conflict that has ever arisen between this site and Tigerdroppings happened because the administration of Tigerdroppings did something that I thought was jaw-droppingly surprising.

Was I warned against linking to this blog? Yes. Did I follow that mandate 100%? No. Did I follow it mostly? Yes. Was I kicked off for linking? No.

To summarize this, it is perfectly within the rules of Tigerdroppings, and even encouraged, to start a thread with the topic "Top 5 strangest places you've taken a dump," but you must not link to a blog that talks about football. Linking to the blog that talks about football is clearly outside of the purview of a message board about football. Hell, the topic on taking a dump will probably go on for 3 to 5 pages, and more than one admin will probably post to it.

I don't justify breaking the rules, but the Tigerdroppings rules are broken all the time. It's almost a rite of passage over there to break some rule and cause some drama and then it all blows over in a day or two. I broke the rule against linking to this website exactly once after I came to understand exactly what the rule meant, and I've been banned twice, neither time was immediately after linking this blog. It's not the linking that got me banned. It's something else. Did I break the rule? Yes. Am I the only user in the world who deliberately broke a rule once? There will probably be more than one TD user who deliberately breaks a rule TODAY.

Like it or not, there are some unwritten rules at Tigerdroppings. These rules aren't advertised except to people who unwittingly break them. Unwritten rule #1 is, "Don't talk about the unwritten rules." I guess if you talk about them, they're no longer unwritten.

I don't know why there are unwritten rules. I don't know why certain things are out of bounds, and I don't know why they don't want other users to know that it's out of bounds. It's certainly not out of fear of conflict, as the place is nothing if not full of conflict and drama. It's certainly not because they want to generally restrict what topics are discussed. Almost literally anything goes over there. The only things that are clearly out of bounds are the following:

Use of racial slurs (though expressing racism is not out of bounds, as long as you avoid racial slurs)

Posting of pornography

Linking this blog, whether you are me or anyone else

One of these things is not like the other.

For more, check out the comments section to yesterday's post. Someone decided they did not agree with me, and you can check out his perspective if you want.

2 comments:

tigerdroppings is a joke. it is impossible to have a rational, intelligent conversation over there no matter how hard you try. if you don't believe me, just read the comments from the previous post as richard mentioned.